Wing it!

Some random bits scribbled by Jeremy Zawodny

Oops. With the 80's music playing on the iPod, I finally motivated
myself to write my talk for the conference. I still have 2.5 hour of
flying to go, so it's not like I'm waiting until the last minute.

The talk seems to be of the right length. But I'm worried about
the topic. I know I'm supposed to talk about MySQL & PHP, but
what about them am I supposed to say?

I don't remember, exactly. And I don't have a conference program
handy. And it's not like there's WiFi in-flight (in a few years
maybe?). So I'm guessing. Hopefully I'm close. :-)

Right now, I have the standard preamble, followed by a review of
MySQL 3.23, 4.0, 4.1, and 5.0 features and development. I then move
on to some performance tips. Then I get into a bit on PHP/MySQL
advice (mostly about persistent connections since they're a persistent
source of "discussion" among some folks). I finish up with some talk
about mysqli, the new MySQL API that has been exposed in PHP
for use with MySQL 4.1's binary protocol (prepared statements and all
that goodness).

I hope there will be questions during the talk (there are always
seem to be) that can help guide things a bit.

I love my iPod. And I really love having power at the seat. Other
airlines could learn a lot form American. (I just got the battery
warning and plugged in.)

(A few minutes later.) Hmm. It's getting bumpy. Hard to type.
We're over the plains now and the atmosphere is a bit more unstable
here. The pilot is taking us down to a lower altitude. Hopefully
that'll help. Looks like part of Idaho maybe.

(Many minutes later.) Well, we're flying over Lake Michigan now.
No turbulence at all, but that's to be expected. Water has a funny
way of calming the atmosphere. It's a very clear day. Ya know, I'm
only a about 30 minutes of flying time from my home town of Toledo,
Ohio.

(A while later.) It looks like there's great soaring over
Pennsylvania today. Lots of cumulus clouds popping up. I even
spotted some nice clouds streets. Their altitude is difficult to
judge, but it seems to be at least 5,000 AGL. From the looks of it,
one could have launched at 2:30pm and expected to stay up for several
hours without much trouble. Amusingly, a 757 pilot probably looks
down there and sees turbulence. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,
I guess.

(Later yet.) Well, we're 80 miles from the airport, landing in
about 20 minutes (gate 43. My body really doesn't believe
that it's already 4:30pm. Hopefully dinner a good night's sleep will
help that. I guess it need to put the notebook to sleep now and
re-pack things. At least the battery is fully charged again!

Funny note. The flight attendants can't tell time. They just
announced it was 2 minutes until 4. Then 2 minutes until 5. And then
someone gave 'em a working watch and he discovered that it is
roughly 4:35pm.

Heh. That's all for now. I'm hoping to post all this crap using
the WiFi from the conference in a few hours. We'll see. If not,
there's always dial-up (shudder!).

Hey excellent talk. I think it was the best one at the conf. and being written on the plane makes me appreciate it more!

on April 25, 2003 09:24 PM

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